The connection of art and heart

“Death,” Wittgenstein said, “is not an event of life; it is not lived through.” I used to find these words a consolation, but there is less in them than experience proves. When deaths are of those whom we love, of course we live through them.

The sense of mortality is fundamental to our literature: “The Iliad” is an account of how one kind of anger (little more than wounded vanity) is banished by rage at the death of Patroklus, whose wounds go deeper in Achilles than his own pique. The hero has already accepted that revenge and everlasting fame can be bought only at the price of his own early death, which is the crowning event of the hero’s life. Martin Heidegger -- that prime example of moral (and physical) cowardice -- proclaimed that “living-towards-death” was the only posture for those who wish truly to inhabit the human condition. (It sounds brave, but remember his Nazi chums: The SS carried death’s heads on their caps.)

I happened to be reading Joseph Epstein’s “Fabulous Small Jews” while making notes on Brown University professor Arnold Weinstein’s book “A Scream Goes Through the House.” In one of Epstein’s mordant stories, I came across a fictional Arnold Weinstein, a mortician. Both Weinsteins are much possessed by death: The professor sees the apprehension of mortality as the grim source of human anguish. “This book,” he tells us, “is about the urgency, centrality, and reach of human feeling. I regard feeling as the very stuff of which art is made.... Human feeling connects us. Works of literature and art can be the bridge. A scream goes through the house. Pain, hurt, feeling, can be shared.”

This incantatory repetitiousness is typical of Weinstein’s style, especially when justifying his title. It caused a sigh or two to go through my house. When, on an early page, I came on the expression “garden-variety stress” -- presumably the cliche “common-or-garden” in pruned form -- I dreaded the 400 pages still to come. Fortunately, Weinstein’s ideas survive their delivery. Just.

His cull of great literature and minor painting is wide and bold: The expected masters (Proust, Kafka, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Dickens) are compared and contrasted with such authors as William S. Burroughs, Georg Buchner, Daniel Defoe, Emily Dickinson and the (to me) unknown poet Linda Pastan. The idea is to recruit us not to an aesthete’s notion of critical finesse but to a more literal, generous aesthetic of common feeling.

Like Turgenev, Weinstein sees art as something that unites people rather than flatters the happy few. He makes a forceful case for the relevance of serious writing to the stressed-out reader-in-a-hurry who is liable to be lured to the shallows by self-help manuals and the gross pap of bestsellers.

If he cleaves to the cultural high ground (and I should hope so), Weinstein emphasizes -- does he ever! -- the “somatic” nature of the reading animal that is man: Readers are not disembodied minds but sentient articulations of flesh and bone. Hence he makes iconic use of that Nordic sadster Edvard Munch, whose small painterly genius he ignores in favor of the artist’s morbid subject matter.

Munch may be a minor painter, but, like T.S. Eliot’s John Webster, “he sees the skull beneath the skin.” The painter of “The Scream” is said here to “know anxiety to be the place we live in. The ‘we’ counts here as a strange counterforce to the solipsism usually identified with anxiety, as if Munch were bent on communalizing horror.” Skeptics may notice that the “we” on which Weinstein bases his conclusion about the artist’s intentions is of the critic’s own composition.

“To be sure,” Weinstein pads on, “many painters have done homage to the authority of the human body, but few have sought its peculiar grammar and syntax in the way Munch has.... Looking at Munch’s depiction of bodies in thralldom to the great forces welling up in and out of them helps us to citizenship rights in the somatic country we inhabit.” The painting “illustrates to perfection” -- what else? -- “the range of our issues.” Does it? Munch is minor precisely because he can hit only one note. If Munch were to succeed in what Weinstein alleges to be his purpose, we should live astride the grave, paralyzed by angst. Do we? Should we? Voltaire said no; Pascal yes. All vote now!

Fortunately, Weinstein’s sensibility has far greater range than Munch’s. The perceptiveness of his (slightly apologetic) passion for Proust promises how superbly le petit Marcel conveys the feelings we have when living through the death of others. The narrator’s disgust at his beloved grandmother’s mortal remains is matched by his enduring recognition of the old lady’s selfless spirit. Such love has little to do with the artful eroticism of the narrator’s lover Albertine, whose death is absurd and whose memory will lose its purchase. Unlike Proust, Weinstein does not read art as a means of redeeming mortality, nor does he accept Andre Malraux’s view that we become artists not by looking at life but by looking at art. Screams are spontaneous; their music is not. Poems scan; feelings do not.

Freud often said that creative writers diagnose the human heart better than scientists (of whom he took himself to be one). His account of mourning is nevertheless given uncritical homage. Yet isn’t it crass to analyze our digestion of grief only in terms of waning libido? Not all mourning is of a sexually desired creature such as Albertine. Freud -- like Weinstein on Munch -- describes phenomena in terms that make him right by definition. I am sadly somatically, Weinstein might say, certain that there are deaths whose mourning becomes part of the bereaved, as did that of Eugene O’Neill’s “Electra.”

Weinstein is more persuasive in his appreciation of the transactional nature of dramatic writing. (Henry James wanted fiction to be in that category.) The professor is convincing on the merits of O’Neill’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and almost made me want to see Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” though -- as with Burroughs -- wild horses pull in the opposite direction. On Ingmar Bergman, Weinstein is piously solemn, though Monty Python has made it impossible to remember “The Seventh Seal” without a smirk.

It would be nice to share the belief that cinema could furnish “texts” of a quality to match great novels, but what film has the density and the elimination of the expected to be found in the best written work? What is photographed must always, to a degree, reproduce the common world, whereas poets can -- and Ezra Pound told us should -- “make it new.” Film can persuade and shock, amuse, denounce and scandalize, but its trick is to seduce and deceive. Even the greatest director is more like a chef (with an equipe of unacknowledged acolytes) than a great artist. One wearies of Bergman as one does not of, say, novelist Italo Svevo.

“A Scream Goes Through the House” celebrates and winces at literature’s penetrative assault. There is something intrusive, like surgery, in what good writing can do: It is illustrated with savage clarity by Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” when the court’s sentence is inscribed in the convict’s flesh. Weinstein is cruelly alert to the duplicity of the medical mode, literal and metaphorical.

No wonder many writers -- from Proust to Somerset Maugham to John O’Hara, Chekhov to Hemingway to William Carlos Williams -- are doctors or sons of doctors. The doctor has the right to probe and cut, to drug and needle his patients/victims. At his best, he is Balzac’s “Country Doctor”; at his worst, Josef Mengele or Louis-Ferdinand Celine, prescribing the bloodbath as panacea.

Strindberg’s “diagnostic gaze” is shrewdly emphasized, as is the duplicity in Hemingway’s story of his father’s medical practice in “The Indian Camp.” Weinstein also pays due homage to Sherwood Anderson’s “Paper Pills.” (Did Hemingway learn something from Anderson’s clinical terseness?) Strangely, neither “The Magic Mountain” nor R.F. Ellis’ account of medical torture in “The Rack” is mentioned in connection with the punitive promise of “immortality” with which the medical profession teases the layman.

Weinstein misuses “decimate” (frequently). He alternates platitudes and egotism. And between fancy locutions, he descends to “humongous” and “inventorying.” If he scarcely values the virtues of irony and stoicism, he undoubtedly -- and instructively -- unearths new treasures in old ground.

Above all, he establishes that no scientist can comprehend the human condition as thoroughly -- because inventively, as a creative imagination, truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.